Just over a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's latest entry for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
